In Israel, Haredi men get welfare checks for studying the Torah instead of working. Sounds to me like their faith is what they’re demanding of others.
Isn’t it true that they also do not serve in the armed forces in Israel, unlike everyone else?
I’m curious: what proportion of the people in the settlements are Haredi?
The law exempting the ultra-Orthodox from army service was changed last year.
The arrangements Israel made with the extremely religious go back decades and are rooted in 2 or 3 important things:
- The founders of the state were mostly non-religious.
- Scholarship/learning/creative theology is the foundation of Judaism and has been treated as such for over 2000 years.
- The extremely religious view the role of prayer and study differently; they think prayer and devotion actually protects people and thus their studying preserves the Jewish people. This is obviously a massively contentious subject - one of my favorites being the old Shas rabbi's statement that IDF soldiers die because the mezzuzahs in their homes are faulty. It has even colored the memory of the Holocaust because some Haredi rabbis have stated it occurred because of non-religious Jews, sort of an ultimate "blame the victim" form of reasoning in which it was a failure of devotion that caused God not to save all those innocent people. This theological "logic" has even been carried to why the Orthodox sages in Europe - who nearly all died, many in horrible ways - failed to see what was coming: it was a failure of devotion by the non-religious. Needless to say, these views are considered extremely offensive by many, but then there is also an attitude of "what else do you expect from such people".
So the founders of Israel made a deal in which they’d control these things and the religiously devout would control these other things. That included support for study. No one thought it would become this large a burden because no one believed the Haredi would multiply so quickly. It’s hard to tell if the deal was necessary or not because one truth is the non-religious founders didn’t much care about the religious aspects. As a note, one issue in Jerusalem is that before 1900 Jews were the majority and nearly all were devout. (The Jewish Quarter was essentially destroyed - blown up building by building - by Jordan in the 1950s and has been rebuilt.) The Jewish population within Jerusalem is not like the rest of the country.
As to settlements, they fall in several categories. The largest in number is simply economic: land and housing in Israel is expensive and it’s cheaper to live in a community in the West Bank. You might say “why would anyone do that” but if you look at the distances on a map, you’re often talking 10 minutes driving time. Those places are, however, the main source of the road system that serves almost exclusively these places. A second category is the neighborhoods within Greater Jerusalem. Israelis argue with themselves about whether all of these, some of these, etc. are settlements or not. I’m not talking about houses bought in Arab neighborhoods - which is partly religious and often classic gentrification - but if you look at a map of Jerusalem, you see the 1948 War left only a little strip connecting W. Jerusalem to the rest of the country. Most of those areas have been filled in. IMHO, it’s a single city which needs to be administered as a unit and it should serve as the capital for both Palestine and Israel and be governed under a municipal authority.
The settlement category that draws the most attention are the religious ones. Many Israelis never go to any settlement but they certainly avoid these. The people in these settlements are sometimes Haredi and sometimes zealots of another stripe - they were, for a while, heavily American and brought the simplistic good/evil reduction of conflict to the region. The strangest in my mind are the people in Hebron, but that’s another story.
There are some Haredi housing settlements but most are actually within Israel because settlements tend to be either more expensive or are oriented around work, not study.
The difficulty of dealing with the Haredi is one of the greatest problems in Judaism because they are trying to take absolute control of determining who is a Jew, how divorce works, etc. Along with that, they have become violent over things like buses running near their areas on Sabbath and have in the last few years began to insist non-Haredi in their neighborhoods - or in areas where Haredi have moved - conform more and more to Haredi strictures.
This is a helpful explanation. I think there is more media focus on the Haredim in the media - perhaps they are getting the most attention… The majority of Israeli Jews are secular, and Haredim are still less than 10%. In the US, Orthodox Judaism is on a spectrum. There are also different sects, such as Chabad, and so the customs can vary. It seems as if the major issues on airplanes are from a small proportion of people, even within orthodoxy.
Israel is also not a two party political system, and I think some people in the US see it in that manner since it is what we are familiar with. In some ways though, it is similar to us and the population is polticially diverse.
Chabad/Lubavitchers wouldn’t refuse to sit next to a woman on a plane, right? Are these men Satmar?
I haven’t heard of someone from Chabad refusing to sit next to a woman on a plane. Since Chabad families are known to live in many different areas, they must travel frequently, so I assume it isn’t an issue for them.
I’m shaking my head over the idea that flying in a pressurized aircraft with a metal hull over a cemetery makes a person unclean–but not if he encases himself in a plastic bag. Isn’t that nuts, however you think about it?
Right. The “bad vibes” can penetrate a metal hull but not a plastic bag?
Honestly, this is shades of the nuttiness going around that if you say the words Hitler or Satan near water, the water “picks up” the evil vibrations. Just because it’s part of a religion doesn’t mean it’s exempt from Teh Crazy.
I’m just trying to imagine the thought process of the rabbi who came up with the plastic wrap solution. Hmm. Clearly we need a way for Cohens to fly in airplanes, and airplanes fly over cemetaries. Can we say that if it’s high enough, it doesn’t matter? Could we say that as long as the plane is pressurized, it’s like a separate environment and it’s OK? Or…?
How does El Al handle such situations, since El Al probably has a higher density of Cohens flying than most airlines?
Maybe you can put together a route that doesn’t have the problem.
El Al has had big difficulties dealing with these few Haredi on the extreme scale for Haredi. Some of the cases have even ticked off other Haredi on the same plane. There was once a fist fight.
As to the logic of a plastic bag, there’s a thing called an eruv which is a ritual fence that fictionally joins together a bunch of property into one so the devout can act within that sphere as they do at home. This doesn’t mean ignore Sabbath commands but means you can do things like carry your kid, carry your house keys, etc., all forms of work that in a public space are prohibited. Except inside an eruv. And what is an eruv? It’s anything they can string together, so it can be wire or it can be a natural feature - like the water around Manhattan, except the more Orthodox community eventually decided to build eruvs within Manhattan because more is always better. [url=<a href=“http://www.bostoneruv.org/bound.htm%5DHere’s%5B/url”>http://www.bostoneruv.org/bound.htm]Here’s[/url] a link to the Boston eruv. Read it and it will give you a sense of the depth to which observance can go. And understand that some people actually care about which sidewalk is allowed and which isn’t and some who otherwise pay attention to the eruv don’t and some who don’t pay attention care when they’re with people who do care and so on and so on because you can get put 2 observant Jews together and get not 2, not 3 but several opinions. So if some guy thinks he’s adding a layer on top of a layer on top of a layer, then …
Solution: Turn on that fresh air nozzle thing thats overhead next to the light, and aim it away from you/towards the person sitting next to you. That blows the “bad vibes” and uncleanliness of the decedents and the people sitting next to you in the opposite direction. Problem solved
Isn’t magical thinking inherent to all religions?
I have been familiar with the concept of an eruv for decades. I have to admit that to me it simply seems like a way to “cheat” that makes being observant less onerous, like having a Sabbath goy turn your lights on and off for you. (My mother did that for Jewish neighbors as a kid. 
) That, plus the fact that there are so many different levels and forms of observance among Jews, including among Orthodox Jews, leads me to take their supposedly intractable “rules” less seriously.
Good grief, why not just make all El Al planes eruv?
I also admit that my innate skepticism plays into it also, and I feel the same way about other religions, too. I mean yes, there are observances one may choose to do as a form of spiritual practice. That makes perfect sense. But to create ridiculous “reasons” why these practices are somehow ultimately correct or based on prescience on the part of ancestors…no.
As a friend who kept a Kosher home said to me years ago, “Do it for the mitzvah, don’t try to create reasons why it makes sense.” Many of the same people who maintain that Jews not eating pork is because the ancient Hebrews were wisely avoiding trichinosis would fall about laughing if Catholics tried to claim that eating fish on Friday represented a papal appreciation of the value of Omega 3s in the diet.
I don’t think “eruv-ing” (new verb) planes changes the kohanim-flying-over-a-cemetery issue. Kohanim couldn’t visit a cemetery that was enclosed in an eruv.
I’m just thinking that the rabbi could have come up with something better than a plastic bag. Like maybe El Al could sprinkle soil from a non-cemetery location in the cargo hold, and the rabbi could opine that the person was “over” that land while flying. I mean, once you open the door to creative solutions, why not pick one that isn’t an asphyxiation hazard?
Yes, that is really what I meant. Why not declare that the sealed airplane is good enough? Why is the plastic bag better? Is it that conspicuous displays of piety are more attractive? Look at me! I’m kohanim! I’m more special than you are!
Well, in extreme versions of many religions, there is asceticism–perhaps this is a manifestation of something like that. I don’t think it’s necessarily showing off